


The Long Knife

by Mythopoeia



Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Also I never really planned to post this but friends insist so here it is, As though this fandom needs any more thangorodrim content lol, Dialogue Heavy, Gen, Is it weird writing canon Noldor again? Yes, NOT Gold Rush AU, Thangorodrim, This is canon w Doegred, Which is my post-Thangorodrim ficlet series, right back to the AU i go
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-22
Updated: 2019-04-22
Packaged: 2020-01-23 21:18:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,713
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18558049
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mythopoeia/pseuds/Mythopoeia
Summary: Death will be instantaneous, with no time for suffering. A merciful shot, if Findekáno were slaying an animal.But this is not an animal.





	The Long Knife

Findekáno is so exhausted, his face burned raw by the cold and the sunlight and his ears ringing with the icy winds singing down the stones, that it takes him a moment before he realizes what his cousin is asking him to do. 

“I can’t,” is his instinctive reply. The enormity of what he is refusing hits him once he says the words, like a wave. He staggers; he throws his hand out to catch himself against one of the nearest stones. The mountains here are deadly, the bared teeth of the world made sharp and cruel where Morgoth has taught them to hate and to hunger. The edge of the stone slices greedily through both his glove and his palm, but he is so cold he cannot even feel the pain of the wound, only the heat as his blood wells up. 

Above him, Maitimo stirs like a maimed, dying thing, like a thing that should not be moving at all. His voice is slurred and cracked, the words crawling out of him as though he is struggling to remember how they should sound. There is an ugly accent to them that Findekáno does not recognize, does not remember from before.

“Please," he says. " _Please._ Findekáno."

"I cannot!"

"But you can. Findekáno, listen. Are you frightened? Is it the Doom? Listen. I will speak to Mandos upon your behalf. I will tell him it was not your fault. If I choose death, how can Námo say it is your crime? I will tell him it was me. Please."

"You will speak to no one ever again from the Void," replies Findekáno, feeling sick. But if there had been any fleeting thought in his mind that this was only an apparition, a vision sent to torment his hopes either by his own failing body or by Morgoth’s malice, this at least has him convinced he has truly found his cousin. Even though the body hanging there is so changed, even though the voice is changed, that is his cousin speaking again, truly--that razor intelligence and reasoning, calculating mind, rallying enough to be persuasive even now. _Sweet-mouthed as his father,_ so the saying was in Tirion, back when Fëanáro was content to get his way with words only instead of swords. 

(And even if it is true, he cannot help but think—even if Maitimo truly wants death, why then can he not simply die? There were some on the Ice who could not bear the crossing, and who chose to die rather than to suffer the long march to its end, but their deaths came upon them like sleep, their _fëar_ , despairing of their agonized bodies, simply slipping away in the dark. Even Fëanáro’s mother, Findekáno had been told, had lain down her body when she wearied of it too much, and she did not need Finwë to cut that bond with a knife—or with an arrow. Selfishly, madly, he finds himself angry at his cousin.)

Maitimo does not visibly react to the reminder of his Oath and what it has promised him, and that makes Findekáno even angrier, because he should _care_. Instead his cousin just begs again: “Please.” It is nothing more than a gasp, and then he breathes a moment, open-mouthed and glassy-eyed, before he speaks again. "Kill me.”

“I cannot!” Findekáno repeats, his voice too loud compared to his cousin’s, ringing out too strongly across the stones. He looks down, and sees that the blood from his ruined hand has dripped down heedlessly over his harp where he dropped it, forgotten, to the ground. “I cannot have come so far, and fought so hard, only for—for that. I came here to save you, Maitimo!” 

_To save us all,_ he thinks, remembering what he had told Nerwen the night he fled his father’s camp in Hithlum. Her disgust had not been appeased, although he had thought at the time that he was speaking the truth, but he knows in his heart—plainly, now that he sees Maitimo again before him after all this time—that she had been right to call him a liar. It had not been politics only, nor his love for his father’s people, that drove his feet this far.

His cousin presses his ruined face into the hollow space of his dead shoulder, shaking.

"It was my fault that you are kinslayer," Maitimo begins, his voice so low Findekáno can barely hear the words over the wind. "It is my fault that you were Doomed along with me. And the ships set ablaze, that is my fault. I did not save Ambarussa. I did not save my father. I have failed everyone I love, I have failed in everything I have done, and I failed you not least of all. Everything, everything I take as my fault. Kill me for it. Please."

"I am not here to execute you."

“Then why are you here?” His cousin is weeping now, with horrible wrenching sobs that cannot even in this extremity of grief bring tears to his dry, dry eyes. In their youth in Túna Maitimo had always been as open with his emotions as his more mercurial father had been, blinding in his joy, brilliant in his mirth. Never before has Findekáno seen him in despair. The absolute misery of it makes him quail. The last embers of his rage go suddenly cold within him, turning all to grief instead, and that is somehow even worse. 

"You made me kinslayer once before," Findekáno says brokenly, staring up through misting eyes. "I swore it would never happen again. I _promised._ "

He had not thought his cousin had any blood left to lose, but Maitimo’s face goes stark white behind the crust of blood and burning. 

"That blood is not on your hands," he rasps at last. “You did not know what it was you were doing.”

"That is not true," Findekáno says, his hand shaking as he moves it finally, finally, to the quiver at his hip. “I knew enough. I should have been strong enough not to put you first.”

_And this is my punishment,_ he thinks sickly, pulling his bow from his back. It was usually the work of a moment to string the weapon, but his hands shake with the cold, and the cord slips again and again. He has to strip off his gloves to get it right, the fingers of his wounded hand slick with blood. He wipes the blood against his trouser leg. _Kinslayer,_ he thinks, and not for the first time, staring down at the gash in his palm. It has already almost stopped bleeding, the cold of the cruel mountain air congealing it almost as well as the cold of the Grinding Ice once did.

_I am a kinslayer, and now this._  

"What am I to tell your brothers?" He cries, still stalling with his hand upon the arrow, the fletching smooth against his fingers. Most of his arrows are more crudely made, with bone and wood still unfamiliar to him and fletched with feathers scavenged from the harsh stony lands around Hithlum or, worse, scraps of fur from the misshapen, monstrous creatures he had hunted with Irissë on the Ice. This arrow is one of only three that remain from his stock from Valinor, beautiful and inlaid with yellow gold, oiled and polished and sweet. When he pulls it back to his cheek it smells like his father’s house, like his mother’s hands. 

"Tell them you never found me," Maitimo says. Findekáno cannot tell if his voice is trembling more than before. Findekáno’s own hand is trembling, and so he sucks in a deep breath and then forces it out again, willing himself steady. If he is to do this, his aim must be sure. He gauges the wind and adjusts his sights slightly, until he is sure that the shaft, once loosed, will fly true to bury itself in Maitimo’s right eye. Death will be instantaneous, with no time for suffering. A merciful shot, if Findekáno were slaying an animal.

But this is not an animal. 

“Makalaurë will not believe me,” Findekáno says, and his hands are still as stone but it is his voice now that shakes. _Kinslayer._ His father was always so careful, when he was a child, to teach him that the Valar were just. In this horror Findekáno can see that merciless justice meted out by pitiless hands. He can recognize the perfect irony of punishing him in this way, kinslayer made kinslayer again in truth, but still he would cry that it is cruel most of all, cruel beyond bearing.

“Him, tell the truth,” is Maitimo’s reply, and his words are steady now, broken with a brokenness that goes beyond being voiced. “He will understand.”

_Or he will cut my throat,_ Findekáno thinks, but does not say. In this moment, blinking the water from his stinging eyes, such a prospect does not make him quail. He tries to calm his breathing, gazing down the long line of his arrow to the face of the cousin he most loves, and braces himself to do the one thing he knows neither Makalaurë or he himself will ever be able to forgive.

*

He cannot bring himself to pray for salvation, but he does pray for pity. 

And pity—comes. Not in the strength he needs to kill his cousin, but in the shadow of the Great Eagle, and the cruel, golden beak, touching him gently, staying his hand.

*

Findekáno pulls the knife from its sheath, and does not look away as his cousin lifts his head slightly, turning his filthy face to Findekáno’s own, his grey eyes gaping in that mask of blood and grime. Findekáno is so close now, as he raises the knife behind Maitimo’s head, that they are almost cheek to cheek. 

“I missed you,” Maitimo whispers, staring. “Even before the dark, I missed you.”

“I missed you, too,” Findekáno says, crying, and then he seizes his cousin’s wasted body around the ribcage with his left arm, and Maitimo makes a horrible painful sound but presses his face into Findekáno’s shoulder like he would into an embrace, and Findekáno holds him, and lifts him, and drives the long knife home.


End file.
